On the waterfront | 12 October 2017

Much has been made of the American novelist Jennifer Egan’s mutation, in her latest novel, from purveyor of metafiction and fragmentary, experimental narratives to creator of a solid piece of traditional realism. Manhattan Beach tells the story of a father and daughter in New York in the years in and around the second world war: Eddie is a mobster’s bagman, who disappears without apparent trace early on; Anna is left distraught, but is also a resilient striver, growing up to become the only female diver in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard. Betwixt and between them stands Dexter Styles, a nightclub owner and instrument of the mafia, swishing between cold malfeasance and a yearning for a life less compromised.

But despite its appearance of solidity, Manhattan Beach shares with Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad and an earlier novel, The Keep, a vivid apprehension of the provisionality of human life and the onus on fiction to dispose itself accordingly in the attempt to capture it.